Please give a hearty welcome to MIT’s new professor of Anthropology, Sonya Ataly.

Dr. Ataly is a “public anthropologist and archaeologist who studies Indigenous science protocols, practices, and research methods carried out with and for Indigenous communities.” Her most impactful work has been a series of research-based comics about repatriation of Native American ancestral remains, return of sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony.

“Indigenous knowledge systems carry tremendous information and value, and it’s shortsighted to think that current research practices founded on Western knowledge systems are the only or ‘right’ approach,” Dr. Ataly explains.

Addressing climate change is a major focus of the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science that Dr. Atlay founded before she was recruited by MIT.  She is deeply concerned that “archaeologists had disregarded Native understanding of the rock as an animate being, cutting it off from the living system of which it’s a part. We need to engage in science practices that recognize communities have sacred or traditional knowledge that requires specific care.”

Dr. Atlay successfully extracted $30 million dollars from the National Science Foundation to use Indigenous Knowledge to address the impacts of climate change, the threats to cultural places and the shift in our food systems.

“Combining Indigenous and mainstream Western sciences involves the ‘plural coexistence’ of two very different knowledge systems, a process the Mi’kmaq peoples call ‘two-eyed seeing’ and which we refer to as ‘braiding knowledges,’” says Atalay.

The Beaver attests that he has not made up a word of this but merely copy-pasted from the referenced sources.